RT8, Page 1

Road Trip 8, P. 1

April 15, 2008. We arrived in Williamsburg yesterday, Monday the 14th at approximately 2:30 PM. We left Encinitas on Thursday, April 3rd and traveled 3,454 miles in the great white van across the south, mostly along I-10, to I-95 in Jacksonville, FL. There we turned north and eventually made our way here. Along the way we camped in the van eight nights in a row (a new record for us!) and spent two nights in a nice hotel in the Historic Area of Charleston, South Carolina. We paid $3.189/gal in Surfside Beach, SC, (the least) and $3.599/Gal in Encinitas (the most by 24 cents/gal) and used roughly 257 gallons of gas to get here. Our carbon footprint is pretty big, eh? Maybe we'll plant a bunch of trees in the back yard to make up for it.

Our first stop was Kartchner Caverns State Park in southern Arizona about 50 miles east of Tucson, a place recommended by Bob La Forest for its impressive, um, caverns! We never made it into the caverns, but the campground was really nice and we saw billions and billions of stars that night.

As we headed east the next morning we saw a couple billboards advertising wineries and wine-tasting, so naturally we had to stop and see what was up. We found Coronado Winery not too far off the highway and settled in for a tasting. After all, it was about 10:30 AM and we had already traveled 50 or sixty miles! The wines were surprisingly good so we bought a few bottles and got back on I-10 in a much happier mood. I forget who was driving.

We didn't get very far that day but we did manage to cross two time zones which is sort of unusual in a car. We stayed at an RV park in good old Van Horn, Texas, that night and, as we were leaving the next morning, I saluted Van Horn by beeping the van horn. Get it?

After an extremely thrilling ride through West Texas (listening to David McCullough's book "John Adams" was the highlight of our journey) we finally made it to South Llano River State Park. We've stayed there before and knew it was a decent place even though it is about 1,000 from anywhere.

We took a hike down to the river and saw this young family of four paddling by, I was hoping they would capsize and they almost did. Alas, the dad jumped out of the canoe and saved the day. They water was only a couple feet deep.

This is us camping.

April 6, Sunday, we left South Llano and decided to leave I-10 and head up through the Texas "Hill Country" west of Austin. As fate would have it, this turned out to be the second day of "Texas Hill Country Wine and Food Weekend"! Our first stop was Fredericksburg, a very nice, clean town with a distinctive German influence, In fact, much of the area was settled by Germans and many of the place names are German. More importantly, the Texas wine industry is bourgeoning and this area apparently is the center of it. Naturally, we stopped for a tasting, this time at a place called Grape Creek Vineyards in Stonewall. Again, the wines were good!

The night was spent at Somerville State Park, somewhere east of Austin. We had a great site right on a lake with plenty of privacy.

The next day was fairly uneventful. We made it as far as Lafayette, Louisiana, and stayed is a place call the Acadiana RV Park, which was in a semi-suburban setting but was quiet and interesting. There was a nature center and a boardwalk nature trail where you could see the mosquitoes close up. We didn't see any gators though.